BuzzFeed News is joining forces with other media groups and civil rights organizations for a project called Documenting Hate, which aims to “better track hate crimes across the United States,” the Internet blog announced on Tuesday.
The project, which is being spearheaded by the nonprofit journalism outfit ProPublica, urges the victims and witnesses of hates crimes to alert reporters, who can “follow up with you to investigate the incident.”
The impetus for the project, according to BuzzFeed, was the recent wave of “disturbing reports that hate crimes are on the rise” following the election of Donald Trump, who as a candidate frequently used “harsh rhetoric about race, ethnicity, gender, and religion.”
Because the data on these incidents are “woefully inadequate,” the organizations participating in Documenting Hate will seek to collect as much information as possible about hate crimes in America in order to determine if there really is a “tide of hate crimes rising across the nation,” and put pressure on authorities to crack down.
The group is seeking information on hate crimes according to the FBI’s legal definition, such as physical threats and assaults, as well as incidents that don’t meet the legal definition, such as online harassment.
Media organizations have struggled to report on hate crime allegations in the wake of Trump’s election. A number of the reported incidents have turn out to be fabricated.
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